Understanding Cognitive Distortions: How Your Thoughts Shape Your Self Love, Your Nervous System, and Your Identity

Most people move through life believing their thoughts are simply reporting the truth. A thought appears, and because it feels familiar or arrives with a rush of emotion, it feels real. But if you’ve ever spiralled over a delayed message, assumed someone was pulling away when nothing had actually happened, or convinced yourself you’d ruined everything after one small wobble, you’ve already experienced a cognitive distortion. These patterns are subtle, automatic, and they often sound exactly like your own voice — which is why you don’t recognise them as distortions at all.

Your brain developed these patterns long before you had the emotional maturity to question them. They were designed to protect you, to help you anticipate threat, to soften the blow of disappointment, to keep you connected or safe. The problem is that your brain doesn’t update its predictions easily. It keeps using old information to navigate new moments, and those predictions shape how you feel, how you interpret people, and how you treat yourself.

These distortions often come from childhood dynamics, inconsistent affection, emotional unpredictability, harsh criticism, or relationships where you learned to over-function, over-anticipate, or stay small. They’re not flaws — they’re adaptations. And without awareness, they blend seamlessly into your identity. You start believing “this is just the way I am” without ever realising this is just the way you learned to survive.

This is where things begin to land on that deeper level — because when you see your distortions clearly, you suddenly understand why you feel the way you feel, react the way you react, and doubt yourself the way you do. They don’t just distort reality. They distort your relationship with yourself.

And here is where the punch lands — because these examples are the ones that make people pause and say, “Okay… that’s uncomfortably accurate.”

All-or-Nothing Thinking
If it isn’t perfect, it’s a failure. One slip and your mind goes, “Well, stuffed it now,” and throws the whole thing out.

Overgeneralising
One person cancels and suddenly it’s, “People always leave. I knew this would happen.”

Mental Filtering
You could receive ten compliments and one neutral comment, and your mind obsessively replays the neutral one as if it was criticism.

Disqualifying the Positive
Someone praises you and you internally shrug it off — “They don’t mean that… they’re just being polite.”

Mind Reading
They’re quiet. They’re distracted. They’re short with their text. Your brain fills in the gap with “They’re annoyed with me” without a single piece of evidence.

Fortune Telling
Before anything even unfolds, your mind jumps straight to, “This will end badly. I can feel it.”

Catastrophising
Left on “read” becomes “They’re done with me.” A normal bodily sensation becomes “Something is seriously wrong.”

Emotional Reasoning
You feel insecure, so your mind insists there must be something wrong. The feeling becomes the proof.

Should Statements
You hold yourself hostage to invisible rules — “I should be coping better; I should be over this; I should never get this emotional.”

Labelling
You make one mistake and immediately declare, “I’m hopeless… I’m a mess… I always do this.”

Personalisation
Someone seems off, and your brain instantly assumes, “It’s because of me. I must have caused it.”

Blaming
Instead of looking inside, everything becomes external: “I feel awful because of what they’re doing.” No room for nuance.

Minimising
You achieve something meaningful and your brain goes, “It’s nothing. Anyone could have done it.”

Maximising
You stumble over your words and suddenly your mind has rewritten the moment as a catastrophic failure.

Control Fallacies
Either everything is your responsibility — “I have to fix this” — or it’s entirely out of your hands — “There’s no point trying; nothing I do matters.”

Fairness Fallacy
You give generously, love deeply, show up consistently… and feel betrayed that others don’t follow the same internal rules.

Heaven’s Reward Fallacy
“I’ve sacrificed so much. Why does no one appreciate it”
The unspoken belief: your effort should guarantee a return.

These examples land so hard because they’re not theoretical. They’re lived. They are the exact thoughts that keep you anxious, reactive, second-guessing, shrinking yourself, or tolerating far less than you deserve. They run automatically, and until you learn to recognise them, they quietly dictate how you see yourself and what you believe is possible for you.

This is why self love work can feel impossible when distortions are running the show. How can you love yourself when your mind is constantly presenting you with distorted evidence that you are not enough How can you feel secure when your brain is wired to expect abandonment How can you trust yourself when your internal narrative keeps dragging you into past pain Every distortion creates distance between you and your own worth.

Shifting these patterns doesn’t start with forcing positivity or arguing with your mind. It begins with noticing — gently, honestly, without judgement. The moment you recognise a distortion, something loosens. The emotional charge softens. You find yourself able to respond instead of react. The body plays a massive role in this. When a distortion hits, your nervous system fires before your reasoning does. Calming the body creates space for the mind to recalibrate. What felt true minutes earlier suddenly looks less like truth and more like habit.

Curiosity becomes the next step. Not interrogation, but a softer kind of questioning. “What if this isn’t the whole story” “What else could this mean” “Is this fear about now or something older” Slowly, these questions help you build self trust — the foundation of every secure relationship you will ever have, including the one with yourself.

And something beautiful happens over time. The distortions lose their power. The spirals shorten. You feel less ruled by fear and more rooted in clarity. You stop abandoning yourself to keep the peace. You stop interpreting everything through the lens of past wounds. You start becoming someone who leads themselves through discomfort rather than collapsing beneath it.

If you’ve felt yourself in these examples — if you recognised the patterns, if your mind whispered, “God, I do that all the time,” you’re already halfway to change. Awareness is the turning point.

And if you want support to truly unpick these patterns, to understand your mind on a deeper psychological level, to rebuild your emotional foundations and your sense of worth, this is the exact work I help women do. You don’t have to guess whether your thoughts are true, or carry the weight of navigating all this alone.

If you’re ready to shift the way you think, feel, and relate to yourself, you can book a connection call with me and we’ll explore what your next steps could look like.

Book your call: https://tammybiton.com.au/book-a-session